We feature the authors of “Provoking Reflective Thinking in Post Observation Conversations.” Younhee Kim and Rita Elaine Silver share their reflections about the research and writing behind their article featured in the 2016 May/June Issue in the Journal of Teacher Education. Their article is available to view here.
Q. What motivated you to pursue this particular research topic?
We talk about this some in the article. This investigation actually arose out of another project. Rita was working with some teachers in school on a teacher development project for reading comprehension instruction. Part of that project involved post-observation conversations while watching videos of the lesson. As the project developed Rita and her research team felt the post-observation conversations weren’t quite what they wanted – were the teachers using these as an opportunity to reflect? Was the structure of the interviews appropriate to the goals? This came up in conversation with Younhee – it seemed like a great opportunity to turn a perceived ‘problem’ (or possible problem) into a research opportunity. CA [conversation analysis] seemed like the best approach to tackle this in a way that would be robust and illuminating.
Q. Were there any specific external events (political, social, economic) that influenced your decision to engage in this research study?
Not really. It wasn’t so much external events or forces as those internal to the larger research project and our own concerns as researchers, teacher educators, and professional developers.
Q. What were some difficulties you encountered with the research?
One of the greatest difficulties was to find an analytic focus. As we explained in the article, we didn’t know exactly what we are going to look into when we started the project except the vague idea of tension. Just as we expect readers will want to know “What do you mean by tension?” at the outset, we also wondered what we were sensing and whether or not it was important for the goals of the project. Delving into the data with such an open-ended question meant the analysis took quite a lot of time, with multiple, possible analytic foci, e.g. trouble talk and response to it, preference structure in teacher’s response to mentor’s question. All of this eventually helped us notice the significant feature of who initiates the interaction and the format of initial question.
Another difficulty was to present CA findings to non-CA audiences, explicating the CA jargon and making it more accessible to an audience interested in teacher education, but not necessarily in CA.
Q.Writing, by necessity, requires leaving certain things on the cutting room floor. What didn’t make it into the article that you want to talk about?
We had other excerpts that showed more detail and provided further evidence– we would have loved to include those excerpts and discussion. We had to keep a tight rein on ourselves!
In particular, we would have liked to include a few more excerpts of the successful cases of mentor initiation because data excerpts always present a much richer picture than just summarizing in a few sentences. By the way in which the mentor built up the talk, the classroom scene at the moment was reconstructed in the talk, which effectively primed the teacher to reflect on her teaching of the moment and to be receptive for the feedback given by the mentor.
Q. What current areas of research are you pursuing?
Thinking specifically about these data, we would like to follow up on possible issues related to the way the post observations proceeded with the two different interviewers. One was a university-based researcher/professor from the US; the other was a former teacher in the local schools, Singaporean, and working as a Research Associate at the university at the time of the study. It seems likely that there would be some difference in the interactions based on these factors. We are wondering if it was their interactional style (i.e., questioning style) that caused the difference in teachers’ responses or was there something else, for example, the teacher’s perception of the mentor based on their ethnicity and status. Our reviewers asked about that and we agree it is a topic worth investigating.
Q. What advice would you give to new scholars in teacher education?
What we learned from this project is to keep the channel open among/between your colleagues and to be flexible is important. The contribution of the micro-analysis of spoken discourse is still an under-explored area.
Contact the authors at:
Younhee Kim-younhee.kim@nie.edu.sg
Rita Elaine Silver-rita.silver@nie.edu.sg